Sunday, December 25, 2011

Several opposition supporters were arrested for trying to enter the stadium

Troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo blocked entry to a stadium where the main opposition leader planned to inaugurate himself as president.

Etienne Tshisekedi has rejected the official victory of incumbent President Joseph Kabila in November's elections.

A BBC reporter says police used stun grenades to disperse people attempting to get to the stadium in the capital.

So Mr Tshisekedi's conducted the unofficial inauguration at his home residence instead.President Kabila was sworn in for a second term on Tuesday after being declared the official winner with 49% of the vote, compared to Mr Tshisekedi's 32%.

Western observers denounced the presidential results as seriously flawed, but the election commission - backed by the African Union - hailed the polls a success.

The US-based campaign group Human Rights Watch (HRW) says police have killed at least 24 people since the disputed polls.

State television reported on Monday that he died on Saturday and the announcer said the cause was "physical and mental over-work".

The official news agency KCNA said Kim died on board a train during one of his field trips outside the capital of the communist country.

Meanwhile, the Yonhap news agency said the South Korean military has been placed on emergency alert, as shares on the stock market in Seoul fell nearly five per cent.

South Korea's presidential Blue House has also called an emergency National Security Council meeting.

Reclusive 'dear leader'

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.

ABC7 aired a special called "A Journey of Hope: The Bay Area to Sierra Leone" on Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. The special took viewers to one of the most dangerous places on earth for mothers and young children to see the progress being made with help from the Bay Area and beyond.

Show synopsis:
The West African nation of Sierra Leone was devastated by a brutal war marked by the struggle for blood diamonds and widespread atrocities. Today there is peace and a new focus on controlling malaria, malnutrition and a devastatingly high child mortality rate. The Bay Area is contributing to that effort by training physicians, spearheading ground breaking research, and contributing to the well-being of children and their communities.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged world powers on Wednesday to act “in the name of humanity” against Syria’s crackdown on dissent, as a U.S. official likened the Damascus regime to a “dead man walking.”

Activists said Syrian forces killed another 21 civilians on a day when the U.S. State Department’s special coordinator on Middle East affairs Frederic Hof told U.S. lawmakers that “change is surely coming to Syria.”

Ban told reporters in New York that the status quo in Syria – where security forces on Wednesday reportedly shot dead civilians, cut power lines and conducted raids and arrests – “cannot go on.”

“In the name of humanity, it is time for the international community to act”, he said.

Six people were killed early on Wednesday near the Syrian city of Hama after their car was hit by a mortar shell, Al Arabiya reported citing activists at the Syrian Coordination Committees. The new deaths raise the death toll of violent crackdown on protesters within the past 24 hours to 47 people, mostly in Idlib, Al Arabiya said.The bloodshed in the northern province of Idlib, which borders Turkey, highlighted the accelerating violence in Syria where an insurgency has begun to overshadow what started as peaceful street protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s 11-year rule.

Syrian activist Ammar Qurabi told Al Arabiya that a road map has already been planned for establishing safe corridors on the Syrian-Turkish borders. He said that the Turkish government was only waiting for an Arab and regional cover to apply the planned road map. “However, as more civilians are killed in Syria, Turkey might ask for a cover from the NATO,” he said.

The United Nations’ Navi Pillay said the death toll was 1,000 higher than an estimate she released 10 days earlier. It includes civilians, army defectors and those executed for refusing to shoot civilians, but not soldiers or security personnel killed by opposition forces, she said, according to Reuters.

The Syrian government has said more than 1,100 members of the army, police and security services have been killed and state media reported 17 military funerals on Tuesday for victims of “terrorist armed groups.”

Pillay said Syria’s actions could constitute crimes against humanity, issuing a fresh call for the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said:

“The situation is totally unacceptable. The brutal repression of civilians must stop. Assad must listen to his people, to his neighbors, to the Arab partners, to Europe, to the world. We all have the same message: he should stop the violence against his own people and let the transition begin.”

The sharp rise in the death toll is bound to lend weight to those arguing for increased international intervention to stop the bloodshed in Syria which some fear is increasingly drifting towards civil war.

Assad, 46, whose minority Alawite family has held power over majority Sunni Muslim Syria for four decades, faces the most serious challenge to his rule from the turmoil which erupted in the southern city of Deraa on March 18.

A violent security crackdown failed to halt the unrest -- inspired by popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya -- which turned bloodier in the last few months as defecting soldiers join armed civilians in fighting back in some areas.

Calm returned to Tripoli on Sunday after clashes between an armed brigade and the land forces of the Libyan National Army contesting control over the capital’s airport late Saturday.

The clashes left three men from the Libyan army dead and one fighter was killed while three others from al-Zintan brigade were wounded.

The gunbattle broke out overnight when armed men in the vehicles of Libya’s new national army tried to take control of Tripoli’s international airport from militia men, the commander of the airport’s security force said on Sunday.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Opposition leader Tshisekedi has proclaimed himself the winner of the presidential elections [AFP]

Clashes between opposition protesters and security forces have broken out in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing at least six people, a day after election authorities named Joseph Kabila, the incumbent president, winner of a disputed poll.

Gunfire rang out in a number of cities across the country on Saturday, after Kabila's main challenger, Etienne
Tshisekedi, said he rejected the official results and declared himself the new leader of the vast central African
state.

Kabila's administration quickly condemned Tshisekedi's declaration and described it as "an irresponsible act that violates the laws of the republic".

Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege reporting from Kinshasa said that Tshisekedi's move to name himself president was futile.

"There is hardly any room for opposition to expect the result to be overturned at the supreme court where the result will be ratified. This means that the opposition is dependent on their supporters to take to the streets".But security forces have barricaded areas considered to be opposition strongholds, where violence seems to be continuing, our correspondent said

Friday, December 9, 2011

Washington Post Prophecy:

December 9, 2011

As Ali Sallabi walked through the lobby of Tripoli’s Radisson hotel — a 1980s concrete tower separated from the Mediterranean coast by the soft lines of a whitewashed 16th-century mosque — the Muslim cleric couldn’t take two steps without being approached by fawning Libyans, eager Western journalists and glad-handing representatives of foreign aid organizations.

People slipped him bits of paper with their phone numbers. Armed rebels — teenagers, most of them — asked him to pose for photos on their cellphones. Women sought his blessings.

A short time ago, hardly anyone in the West knew or cared who Sallabi was. But the 47-year-old cleric has quickly transformed himself from longtime spiritual leader of the anti-Gaddafi opposition — albeit from self-imposed exile in Qatar and other gulf states — to chief architect of Libya’s most likely next government, an Islam-based democracy whose shape and leanings remain wholly unclear.

As enthusiastic as his welcome is at home, the reaction abroad to Sallabi’s rise in post-revolutionary Libya has grown wary, even bordering on panicky. Like his Muslim Brotherhood compatriots in Egypt and the new Islamist government in Tunisia, Sallabi is trying to weave a path between wildly optimistic expectations in his country and downright dread from the United States and Western Europe.

Women walk beside an election poster by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood “The Freedom and Justice Party” outside a polling station in Cairo. The Brotherhood promised Egyptians voting in a run-off on Tuesday it would work in a broad coalition if its party wins parliamentary elections. (Reuters)

The Muslim Brotherhood promised Egyptians voting in a run-off on Tuesday it would work in a broad coalition if its party wins parliamentary elections, saying it hoped to avoid a showdown with the ruling military council.

Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie, whose party led the first phase of voting last week, played down suggestions that Islamists would try to dominate parliament when it gets to work after the staggered election is completed in January.

“We will not rule Egypt alone. Parliament will include all the colours of the rainbow that must agree on one direction, one goal,” Badie told the private Al-Mehwar station, according to a transcript of the interview.

Parliament’s popular mandate will make it difficult for the military council to ignore but the army will remain in charge until a presidential election in June, after which it has said it would hand over power to civilians.

Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Libya’s interim leader, dismissed the recent comments by the US officials that Iran had provided the former Libyan regime with hundreds of special artillery shells for chemical weapons, IRIB reported on Monday.

Washington has so far failed to back up the claim with concrete evidence or genuine documents, Abdel Jalil stated.

The shells, filled with highly-toxic mustard agent, have been uncovered in recent weeks at two sites in central Libya. They are reportedly being kept under heavy guard and round-the-clock surveillance.

The US officials alleged that the chemical weapons had been custom-designed and -produced in Iran for Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Melancholia - by Lars von TrierI saw Melancholia at the Naro Film Forum in Norfolk this past Sunday morning, and it was quite a visual and emotional event. Lars von Trier, for those of you who don't know, is one of these afflicted, Dostoevsky-type artistic geniuses who has quite a penchant for portraying the dark side of human experience, not in the pornographic sense of merely sensationalizing it, but in the analytical sense of exploring it. Suffering from depression himself at times, in Melancholia, which is a more classic term for severe depression, he hurls us into a face to face confrontation, through the wonders of hand held photography up close, with the main protagonist, Justine, with her many moods and failings, and who becomes all but dysfunctional as the story unwinds. But this is not merely her story, for Melancholia suddenly becomes a cosmic story involving the threatened destruction of the planet - melancholic annihilation writ large projected from her mind? or an actual reality within the movie's time and space construct? Microcosm and macrocosm of the suffering and apocalyptic visions and fantasies of all humanity at this point in time is what I see going on, and against this we can also discern the clash of dying Patriarchy versus knife-clenching Matriarchy in words, deeds, images and symbolism. Justine, played brilliantly by Kirsten Dunst, confides that deep roots pull at her feet constantly, a terrible burden that exhausts her and disrupts any attempts at normalcy. She is descending into the depths of the earth psychosomatically to find elemental Self, spending endless, even erotic hours in Nature, often on horseback with her sister, and ironically, as all begins to collapse around her, she becomes the strong character of the story.

Set at a huge mansion with vast acreage on the coastline of Sweden, the photography is stunning, even symphonic, although be forewarned that the hand-held style may make you sea-sick over time, so buy some Dramamine or whatever if need be. Her sister Claire, powerfully played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, the anti-heroine of von Trier's disturbing look at misogyny in Anti-Christ, is a poignant study in anxiety in her own right, with a prominent cast of male characters as well, mostly flawed in personality and jaded enough to underscore the symbolically collapsing world of Patriarchy that the story reveals, Kiefer Sutherland playing Justine's brother-in-law with neurotic flourish, John Hurt her somewhat decrepit father, plus Charlotte Rampling as her cynically negative mother.

A tour de force on several levels, both personal drama and collective drama set against a backdrop of pending world annihilation, if you are a von Trier fan do not miss this movie! It says much to our psyches and subconscious.

The man whose arrest in February sparked Libya’s revolution was sworn in as a minister in the new interim government yesterday but said he had been hesitant about taking on the new job.

Fethi Tarbel, a human rights activist and lawyer who represented families of the Abu Salim prison massacre in 1996, was arrested in Benghazi in February.

Fethi Tarbel, Libya’s new sport and youth minister, wiped away tears after he took he swore a pledge of allegiance to Libya with one hand placed on the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Standing in front of Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib and National Transitional Council (NTC) chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Tarbel was among a small group of ministers who had not taken part in the first inauguration of Libya’s government last month.

The interim government will lead the North African country still reeling from a civil war that toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi to elections in seven months’ time.

Tarbel, a human rights activist and lawyer who represented families of the Abu Salim prison massacre in 1996, was arrested in Benghazi in February.

His detention sparked a demonstration by families of the victims of the Abu Salim massacre in the eastern town’s Shajara Square on the night of Feb 15-16.

'This is not the Libya I remember. And I like it'

FARAH ABUSHWESHA was seven when she left Libya and her parents, to live in safety with her Irish grandmother. Two weeks ago, the film-maker and writer returned to a changed country, to meet her father again

AS THE AIRCRAFT descends into Tripoli, I have a flashback to my seven-year-old self undoing my buckle and trying to get off the flight. Inconsolable, I begged the cabin crew to let me return to my parents.This is my first visit to Libya since then. Three decades ago my parents had to send me out of Libya to my Irish grandmother for my safety. Then my father, Redwan Abushwesha, a Libyan writer, was to be arrested by Gadafy’s security forces on suspicion of political dissent.

NTC says ex-deputy PM suspect in general’s killing

The National Transitional Council (NTC) said on Monday a former NTC deputy prime minister was suspected of involvement in the killing of one of the rebel movement’s most senior military commanders.

General Abdel Fattah Younes was killed by his own side in July, an incident that caused deep rifts inside the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. The naming of the suspects risks reviving those divisions.

At a news conference broadcast on Libyan television, NTC chief military prosecutor Yussef Al-Aseifr named Ali El-Essawi as chief suspect. Essawi served as the NTC’s interim deputy prime minister until he stepped down earlier this year

Libyan interim Prime Minister Abdel-Rahim al-Keeb speaks with Abdel Hafiz Ghoga (L), vice chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC) and spokesman for the new authorities, stands next to Libyan interim Prime Minister Abdel-Rahim al-Keeb (R) as the latter speaks during a press conference about the formation of a new Libyan government in Tripoli, Libya, 22 November 2011.

Pluto, the Planet of Evolutionary Transformation

Pluto in its highest astrological or symbolic aspect, in the Jungian sense, is the planet of evolution, urging us to be all that Nature and the Cosmos intended us to be. This is right in our DNA according to esoteric Yogic science and tradition, which teach that the actual energy of transformation lies dormant at the base of our spine.